The Sources and Risks of Russia’s White Revolution
Text by Andeas Umland | March 2012
It is yet unclear what the exact outcome of the current upheaval in Moscow will eventually be. Yet, it seems already obvious that Russian politics will change substantially, in 2012. To be sure, whether Russia indeed becomes more democratic and free as a result of the growing protests remains open. Nonetheless, speaking of an – at least, attempted – Color Revolution is already justified. To be sure, neither would Russia’s possible White Revolution be a real revolution, nor were the other Color Revolutions fully fledged revolutionary upheavals. Yet, there is now, in Russia, the typical pattern of mass protests after a falsified election that partly delegitimizes the incumbent leadership, if not the entire regime. This is a sequence similar to, though not (yet) identical with, what we observed in Serbia in 2000, Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004 and Kyrgyzstan in 2005 – as well as, perhaps, the Arab world, more recently. Why is the Putin system which looked stable as recently as a year ago currently failing? And what are the risks for the re-emerging democratic movement in Russia?
The “Power Vertical” and Corruption
Arguably, Putin made – within the logic of his own system that could have survived longer – one major strategic and one crucial tactical mistake. Strategically, Putin’s preeminent failure was that his “vertical of power” did not fulfill one of its major purposes: to end or, at least, limit corruption in post-Soviet Russia. Instead, of producing a modernizing authoritarianism along the lines of post-war South Korea, Taiwan or Singapore, Putin’s rule deepened rather than erased certain pathologies of late Soviet and early post-Soviet society. Above all, it did not reduce the massive bribe-taking/-giving that goes on in all spheres of Russian public life. Corruption seems to have become even a problem for the security organs that grew out of the KGB – from where Putin once came.
This failure has discredited the rationale of Putin’s contract with society: Instead of trading political freedom for effective governance, the “national leader” took away Russians’ civil and political rights without, however, delivering what he had promised, in exchange. Neither did he end the collusion between the state and the so-called “oligarchs,” nor did he fight bureaucratic arbitrariness effectively. It is no accident that one of the leaders of the current protest movement, the nationalist Alexei Navalnyi, made himself initially a name by blogging about prominent corruption cases in Russia’s elite.
The Orange Revolution and Conspirology
The major tactical blunder of Putin was that he refused to comprehend the reasons and nature of the post-Soviet Color Revolutions, above all of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution – or, at least, drew the wrong lessons from them. Putin and Co. should have been alerted by how quickly and easily Kuchma’s semi-authoritarianism was, in 2004, brought down by the citizens of “Little Russia,” as Ukraine is sometimes labeled in “Great Russia.” One suspects that the reason for Putin’s obvious misunderstanding of the Orange Revolution as a US-inspired upheaval had to do with his own and his “political technologists’” massive personal and financial investment in the 2004 Ukrainian presidential elections. What followed was a blatant misrepresentation of the Orange Revolution, in Russian mass media, as the result of cunning manipulations by Western intelligence services and political foundations.
To be sure, a number of Western and other international organizations – from the US National Endowment for Democracy to the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights – did play their role in securing both the discovery and publicity of the electoral falsifications, as well as the peacefulness and effectiveness of the following protests. However, this Western support – largely going to Ukrainian NGOs rather than parties – played, if at all significant, only a catalyzing role. The main problem was the November 2004 presidential election round itself, and the purpose of much of the following talk about the West’s role in the 2004 Ukrainian events to distract from this. As Yanukovych’s victory and Tymoshenko’s loss (as well as Yushchenko’s humiliation) in the largely fair 2010 presidential elections has shown, the West is neither able nor willing to secure the victory of a pro-Western candidate against the will of a country’s population.
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